"Your letter has this moment reached me. I am overwhelmed by the bad news you send me. Your father has not yet come. Did his ship sail for Reykjavik? Or was it for [Hafnafiord]? Certainly it may have put in at the Orkneys, or the Faroes. But if it sailed a fortnight before you wrote, it ought to be here now. I will make inquiries forthwith.
"I interrupted my letter to send a boat down the fiord to look. It is gone. I can see it now skirting the Smoky Harbor on its way to the Smoky Point. If your father comes back with it, he shall have a thousand, thousand welcomes. The dear good man—how well I remember that on the day I parted from him he rallied me on my fears, and said he would yet come here to see me! Little did he think to come like this. And the worst of his misfortunes have followed on his generosities! Such bighearted men should have a store like the widow's [curse] to draw from, that would grow no less, however often they dipped into it. God keep him till we meet again and I hold once more that hand of charity and blessing, or have it resting on my head.
"I am anxious on your account also, dearest Greeba, for I know too well what your condition must be in your mother's house. My dear girl, forgive me for what I send you with this letter. The day I left the island your father lent me fifty pounds, and now I repay it to his daughter. So it is not a gift, and, if it were, you should still take it from me, seeing there are no obligations among those who love.
"The duties that hold me here are now for the first time irksome, for I am longing for the chance of hastening to your side. But only say that I may do so with your consent and all that goes with it, and I will not lose a day more in sending a trustworthy person to you who shall bring you here to rejoin your father and me. Write by the first ship that will bring your letter. I shall not rest until I have heard from you; and having heard in such words as my heart could wish, I shall not sleep until you are with me, never, never to be parted from me again as long as life itself shall last. Write, dearest girl—write—write."
Here there was another break in the letter, and then came this postscript.
"It is part of the penalty of life in these northern lands that for nearly one-half of the year we are entirely cut off from intercourse with the rest of the world, and are at the mercy of wind and sea for that benefit during the other half. My letter has waited these seven days for the passing of a storm before the ship that is to carry it can sail. This interval has seen the return of the sloop that I sent down the fiord as far as Smoky Point, but no tidings has she brought back of the vessel your father sailed in, and no certain intelligence has yet reached me from any other quarter. So let me not alarm you when I add that a report has come to Reykjavik by a whaler on the seas under Snaefell that an Irish schooner has lately been wrecked near the mouth of some basaltic caves by Stappen, all hands being saved, but the vessel gone to pieces, and crew and passengers trying to make their way to the capital overland. I am afraid to fear, and as much afraid to hope, that this may have been the ship that brought your father; but I am fitting out an expedition to go along the coast to meet the poor ship-broken company, for whoever they are they can know little of the perils and privations of a long tramp across this desolate country. If more and better news should come my way you shall have it in its turn, but meantime bethink you earnestly whether it is not now for you to come and to join me, and your father also, if he should then be here, and, if not, to help me to search for him. But it is barely just to you to ask so much without making myself clear, though truly you must have guessed my meaning. Then, dear Greeba, when I say 'Come,' I mean Come to be my wife. It sounds cold to say it so, and such a plea is not the one my heart has cherished; for through all these years I have heard myself whisper that dear word through trembling lips, with a luminous vision of my own face in your beautiful eyes before me. But that is not to be, save in an aftermath of love, if you will only let the future bring it. So, dearest love, my darling—more to me than place and power and all the world can give—come to me—come—come—come."